Using Easy Digital Downloads

They're Easy, Digital, and Downloadable

What is EDD Anyway?

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)

Free from WPORG

https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-digital-downloads/

Bajillion extensions!

https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/edd

https://easydigitaldownloads.com/extensions/

A free WordPress plugin that lets you run an ecommerce store, mostly for digital items only (but you CAN do it for physical ones). It's written by Pippin Williamson and his team of heroes, and it's some pretty right and tight code. I work with Pippin on plugin reviews, and I respect and trust his work, so when I decided to make a real estore for my works, I picked his plugin above any other.

Why Digital Media Only?

Understand your product

Understand your audience

Understand your (current) limits

The first question you have to ask is 'Why do I only want Digital media?' Before you can answer that, need to understand three things. Your product, your audience, and your limits.

I wanted to sell ebooks. I knew my users would be reading the book while making a site, so digital makes sense. And I don't have the ability or time to handle printed projects yet. If I was a webcomic, however, I know that people like to read the books on the beach and laugh at my jokes, so a physical product is way more important all of the sudden. Music? Totally digital all the way!

Another concern for me was taxes. In California, where I live these days, you don't get taxed on non-physical products. So it's a real money saver for me!

So ... I just upload media?

Custom Post Types means posts is posts

Files upload just like WordPress media

Downloads protected from casual browsing

You can use CDNs (dropbox, Amazon S3)

You set the price, you set the limits

EDD uses custom post types for the downloads, which means they work -mostly- as posts. I say mostly because there are some add-ons in the form of custom meta boxes, where you set things like price and where the download is. It's kind of like the featured image box, and they all feel like a post, so it's all very familiar.
On the download page, you can design what you want the page to look like, how the layout works, and everything you normally do via the post editor. Visual and HTML mode work as normal, and it's comfortable.
The download page also lets you set things like prices and limitations, so if you only want a price to work for x-days, or if you want only 10 people to download the item, you can do that.

In order to sell you need a way to handle the money. When you were a kid, you may have had a lemonade stand sort of thing. I used to sell ice in the summer, because people wanted it. To sell, you needed your product and a way to keep your money safe. Here you have your content to sell, but the money is a problem. We're not taking quarters and dollars and making change, we're talking about credit cards. That's big stuff.
This is why we have payment gateways like paypal. They authorize credit cards for more than just online folks, but brick-and-morter stores too. It's the same thing as the card swipe terminals you see in most physical stores. Related to this, you pay merchant fees to credit card companies if you have a brick-and-morter store, and so does your payment gateway. That's why you pay a transaction fee to use Paypal.
In addition to this connection, if you're handling credit cards you must be secure! If you're not using SSL, it's going to limit what you can and can't use for a gateway. Pretty much only basic PayPal will let you use http for processing, since they don't actually transmit any private data between the two sites. But Stripe and WePay? They sure do, and you need SSL and https in order to use them.
Now... I have to take a moment to talk about Heartbleed because of security. If you didn't hear about the vulnerability in the newer versions of OpenSSL, the short version is that some of the information used in a purchase could be pulled from your server's memory. Like passwords and credit card information. Make sure you're using a secure version of OpenSSL.
On your own server, you can SSH in and type 'openssh version' to see what version you're on. 0.9.x is safe, 1.0.x may not be. Check with your webhost or server guru if you're not sure. And if you were vulnerable but have been patched, you need to change passwords and reissue your SSL certs.

Yes! You can save money, make it easier for people to give you money, and charge them more money ... which is not as mean as it sounded...
Making it easier for them to pay is king. When I originally put my books online, it was pay if you want but free is default. When I re-released the store it became pay if you want but pay is default. Previously I saw about 3% of users paying for my ebooks. Now I get around 35%. I consider that a huge success and I did it by changing the default expectation. Clearly I expect you to pay, but I have coupons for paying less. This works well. Similarly, I installed a gateway for Stripe to make it easier for non-US visitors to pay. This also helps for people who hate paypal.
On the last slide, I mentioned payment gateways charging fees before. You can pass that fee on to your visitors, so they get charged extra and instead of you getting $5.99 from every $7 in paypal, you get $7 all around. This is good and bad, but frankly it's something I'd avoid. You're essentially charging more to make more, and the only difference is how obvious it is to your user. It's like ATM fees. My bank refunds them and it's making me more likely to stay. Keep your users.

Option 2: Require Membership

You don't want people just downloading your stuff, I suspect. Stealing your for-sale product sucks!
Picture this. You make the best song ever. You upload it via EDD. Someone buys it and gets the URL of example.com/wp-content/uploads/edd/mysong.mp3
That's dangerous. They could then take that URL and tweet it so everyone can download it! We don't want that!
Out of the box, EDD protects your downloads via one of two ways: forced or redirect. Both work well, and both stop your content from being easily sniped. No direct URLs, and which one you use depends on your server. I use redirect, which gives people a weird looking URL that will either display the PDF in the window (sorry) or force download the epub. The files are pretty small, so it's pretty fast.
But if you want more... Consider using a CDN. If you've ever gotten a link to someone's AmazonS3 or Dropbox site, the URL wasn't just a normal pretty one, it had a long string at the end. That string is checked by the CDN and if it's within a certain amount of time will stop downloading. It depends on how you set it up, but either way, the URL won't be guessable.
You want MORE? Okay, why not lock the site down to members only! That's even more restrictive, but keep in mind what your site is before you do this. My store is on my Multisite, and I don't want everyone to have an account there, so it's not for me.

EDD is free and updates the same way as all plugins in wporg repo. So what about the add ons?
That's what you paid for with that license when you bought an extension, you know. Support, yes, but also updates! For a year. Now before anyone gets all angrtsy about it, I'm in full support of paying for products. I love EDD because I got to download and use it and then decide what I needed. That, to me, is the perfect way for a product to work, and since I knew Pippin vetted the plugins on his Extensions list, I knew I was getting good prodcuts. Heck, I ended up buying something I couldn't use, and they transfered my license over. Paying for something that you use is worth it. I bought two plugins, and one I already know I will be paying for again when it's time, because it's just that good.
Now that we have that settled, EDD has a really cool system when your plugins phone back to easydigitaldownloads.com to check if they need an update and, if so, let you update just like you would via wordpress.org -- There's an extra check, validating your license, that doesn't exist on .org, obviously.
If you plan on selling plugins and themes of your own, EDD even has directions on how you can add in your own update checker so you can act as that service too! Of note: You cannot self-host your updates AND be hosted in the WordPress.org repositories. But doing it this way? Is just fine.

A user does what they do. If you don't need your customers to register, they don't have to. EDD comes with roles for admins and managers, so you can give people access to help you run the site without worry.
But if you want that membership site, you just let them sign up as subscribers. You can even have EDD to force them to make an account before checking out.
Keep in mind your site, though! I mentioned before I'm on a multisite. This is important because a subscriber on my store would be a subscriber for every site on my network. Basically. It's a little more complex than that, but the idea is the same. If you plan on running a store as a membership site, I suggest putting it on it's own site. It'll be more work for updates, but we have the automatic updaters for that.
One you have your users, you should make it worth their while to be users. Discounts? Easy recurring payments for subscriptions? You can do all that with some simple extensions.
There's also the idea of Affiliate Gateways, where your members can make money by helping you sell your wares. They get a percentage, you get a bigger pie. Pippin just released affiliatewp.com, and I've been told the mascot's name is ALF, and not REDD, which I think was a missed opportunity.

What Should I Look Out For?

Payment Gateways

SSL may be required

WePay doesn't allow the sale of Digital Goods (but you can use it for crowd funding)

Refunds will happen

Caching

Security

Heartbleed

The big things to look out for:
Security
Terms of Service
Money
I mentioned SSL before, I really, really, really mean it. This is important. This is for you and them. Heartbleed, I mentioned before, and I'll say it again. SSL and security is not just "Oh I set it up once..." this is something you have to stay on top up. Make sure your certificates don't expire, make sure your server updates regularly, and if you need to, spend the money for a security expert.
Terms of service I mention because I got shot in the foot not reading them, and lost money. Make sure the companies you use for payment gateways or affiliate links or even Google Adsense actually permit you to do what you want to do!
Finally money. Refunds. They're gonna happen. If they happen too much with paypal, you can get burned and lose your account. Make sure your own Terms are clear about refunds and payments. If someone has a problem, treat them like a person and talk to them. Accidental purchases are one thing. If people keep having problems, though, you may need to rethink what you're doing.

Tips and Tricks

One of the best things, to me, about WordPress is that the community makes amazing things happen. The more I get from WordPress, the more I want to give back to it, and within a week of using EDD, I'd submitted patches of code, and suggestions. Be a part of WordPress, and your chosen plugin's community. Good things will happen. That's why you should treat your customers like people, tell them thank you, listen to them, and above all, love what you do.
I mention GPL becuase... it doesn't mean free. If you learn anything from EDD's success, it's that you can sell totally GPL products and still make a living for yourself. You can do this too.
I know I can't go over everything in this short a time, so I want to note that I sell a book about using EDD to make a bookstore. It's $3.98, Chris Lema wrote the introduction, and it's got some code examples for how I did some of what I did. You can get it at https://helf.us/wpeb and yes, the coupons in the sidebar all work for it. Except the secret one about Angry Birds.